Ocean without Water
by Serymn
Summary: A chance meeting: a girl waiting by the rocks, and a half-puppet boy waiting for nothing.


AN: Just a speculation, of what if these two characters met, Sasori and Rin? Nothing much happens, just introspection &amp; a very brief interaction. It's been long since I wrote for Naruto, slowly going back to it. This is kinda lousy xD

* * *

She lies down, against the cracks and crevices between the rocks. She pressed her right ear on the ground, as if hoping to hear a sign of life. She only hears a hollow sound, just like what she hears when she presses the mouth of a large seashell over her ear. It was the sound of wind over the ocean, everlasting and eternal waves breaking on shore, water that has been there before she was born, and will be there forevermore after everyone else is gone.

_What if Obito was alive? What if he survived._ His name is now carved in the black memorial stone, and Kakashi talks to him in secret conversations that Rin didn't want to intrude on. But sometimes Rin wakes from dreams where Obito has survived, that he is alive and in a dark place, half-blind and waiting for them.

If she could, if she had the strength, she would haul each rock, each heavy boulder. Find his smiling, half-rotten corpse, embrace him like they haven't met for years, take him home and give him an honorable burial fit for a hero. Or maybe she would find an empty space, no sign of a dead boy at all, and she'll search until the ends of the earth to find him. She'd say sorry, she'd say they both love him. They'd fight all three together again, they will be stronger than ever before, and no one will ever have to die anymore.

They would always remember him happy. She would always remember him the cheerful, ever-helpful Obito.

(But that's a lie. She'll always remember him as that boy crushed by the treacherous rocks, his blood and guts splattered all over the ground, him smiling through broken teeth and jaw bone. The empty, pink, shrivelled eye socket after she sliced out his eye.)

But what use was he, dead than alive? This place, the war, was only ever good at killing children and honoring them as heroes. From all the deaths she'd seen, maybe honor was a false concept. The deaths, the ever-repeating cycle of war and the pretense of peace, was built in the history and system of the world. It was a pattern: in trying to keep peace, the opposite happens. She feels that her mind is much too young to comprehend these concepts, but what use were they in the death of a friend? Even if she studied and analyzed them all, they wouldn't help bring back the dead.

She still imagines, what if Obito were still alive. She imagines that he and Kakashi would get along better, be an unbeatable pair, and it was truly a sad thing that they only realized their friendship the moment Obito died. There are times these are all she thinks about, blocking out everything but only the memories. Obito dying. Obito's eyes. His smile and how he held her hand, telling both of them to stay strong. Even if years will pass, even until the moment she dies, these are things she will never forget. These are _intrusive thoughts_, the kind that cannot be shut out no matter how hard one tries. They talked about that in classes, about traumatic stress disorders and the effects of war. But it is not like she's forcing herself to forget. Obito deserved to be remembered.

She was alone now, here, on the same rocks that had buried Obito under. She ran away because of an argument with Kakashi, over the unlikeliest things. It was about Obito.

"Obito liked you. He loved you. But when did you return it? Only in his death?" Kakashi asked out of nowhere. Rin resisted the urge to slap his masked face. She knew Kakashi was far from okay after Obito was gone, and it was his sadness and despair that made him say such things. They were only children, and even with all of Kakashi's accolades and expertise, the effects of grief were democratic. Kakashi was no exception. They both suffer the same. Even Rin once found that a small part of her blamed Kakashi for Obito's death. She also blamed herself. Someone like Obito, to die just like that? They taught that in the academy and in the war zone, how to cope, but as always, theory is always easier than application.

"Shut up. You... only claimed you cared after you got his eye. It's easy to say now, isn't it? After he died?" she answered, but with grief in her voice and tears in her eyes.

They stopped as they realized that they sounded like two girls arguing after a crush, but who they were arguing after was dead. She tried to look at Kakashi straight in the eyes, and he looked down, like he can't face her. She doesn't want to think about it. There was no question that he'd die for her. She'd die for him. There would not have been all this drama about protecting and dying if not for the damn war. She missed Obito so much...

(That's why she was breaching protocol and risking danger, only to come back here to where he died just so she can recall, even if it breaks her heart the most, even if every time she goes here she cries...)

#

Sasori sits on one of the many rocks crowding this place. The place looked like it was made out of chakra: a hollow bowl of earth filled with onyx boulders, unnatural rocks. He sharpens the tips of an assortment of blades on a stone. He could sharpen the metal with his chakra, but he still liked doing things with his hands. His right hand is still human, but he has successfully amputated his own left arm and replaced it with a mechanical hand with a flesh-like substance for skin, a kind of plasticine he invented on his own.

There is a girl lying on the rocks. She had been there yesterday and also days before. Sometimes she is crying, or singing, but talking to something that appeared to be buried under the rocks. He's seen it before, the same mannerisms of children wandering over their old homes, watching the dead faces of their families in the aftermath of war.

She has been there every time he was here. She was waiting for something. When Sasori found that he was also wondering and waiting who she might be waiting for, he stood up to ask her. Sasori hated waiting.

#

It was dangerous to go here. For a long time, she had wanted to go here. The place was barren, and from where she was all she could see were rocks. They were as large as the boulders rising out the ocean and the shore, but there was no water. The place made her think of wounds on dead bodies, black sticky blood attracting flies... a scab in the earth.

She always had her former team mates in mind, though Obito is gone and she wasn't in the same team as Kakashi anymore. Kakashi and Obito were the complete opposite of each other. Where Kakashi's hair was silver-white, Obito's was black. Kakashi's fashion sense was spartan, neutral, utilitarian. When she thinks of Obito she thinks of color, the orange on his navy-blue clothes, the huge smile. She's never seen Kakashi smile, because of that mask. They even had the most contrasting personalities. But it was the usual for genin teams, two boys whose differences complement each other, and a girl acting as a balance.

She looks up, and sees a red-headed boy.

She was busy enumerating the differences between Kakashi and Obito in her mind, about yin and yang, black and white. Then, the contradiction of red was here. Red was the color at the end of the visible spectrum of colors the human eyes can see. The boy was pretty. Not in a handsome way like how she imagined Kakashi's face would be (who can tell? She's never seen his face), and to her Obito was just cute. The boy was pretty. His honey-colored eyes looked luminous in the sunlight, his lips are curved, doll-like. But there was something unnerving about his eyes. They reminded her of doll's eyes, round ones with synthetic plastic eyelids and eyelashes.

Then, she realized she was busy thinking he was _pretty_ rather than he was an _enemy_. His uniform was Sunagakure's. He stood still there, looking down at her. He didn't move at all, even to breathe or blink, just look down on her as if he was looking at a crushed dead insect.

She only looked back. She didn't feel like this would be dangerous, but she reminded herself that this might be the last time she can go here. By tomorrow, she wouldn't have time for anything except her work, there was a war with injured victims to attend to.

#

"You are always waiting here. What are you waiting for?" he asked.

"My friend died here," Rin answered after a pause. She was surprised at his unfeeling, demanding tone that didn't care about her, only for her answer.

"What use it is to wait here? He won't go back if you wait there," he said, and he walked back to his instruments and continued sharpening and testing his tools. It was as if he lost all interest and concluded she wasn't worth the time.

"You're from Konoha, huh. Hatake Sakumo is still famed in Suna. May I ask, is it true that he killed himself?" the boy asked, and Rin noted that she was still wearing her forehead protector. She had forgotten about that, and she can't remember the last time she took that off. The insignia was already a part of her as much as her skin or her heart.

"Y-yes. His son is my teammate, Hatake Kakashi," she said, with a hint of pride that one of Konoha's best and brightest was her friend.

"That's the same son of Hatake, called White Fang? If he is, then his father is the same man who killed my mother and father," he said without a hint of emotion. Rin could even hear amusement, at the most morbid of coincidences. _Ah, the father of your friend killed my parents_.

Rin's lips trembled, swallowed spit to dampen her parched throat, about to cry at the unfairness of it all. She should be used to death as a shinobi, as a medic, but she still can't help but mourn everyday for all the constant death around her, the orphaned children, the widowed spouses, the murders and assassinations of those who had precious lives, those who left their grieving loved ones. She tried to stop her own outpouring of emotion, it would look bad to feel sympathy at a boy who looked like he could not feel anything.

She bit her lips, and the pain suppressed the tears. She hugged her knees and tried to dream that she was a baby in the comfort of a womb, in a world before birth; or a creature inside a shell in the bottom of the sea. She touched the rock and whispered to a crack: "Obito, I'm going."

She looked back, the boy was gone. She went back home.

#

She never came back again, the next day. Sasori didn't care anyway. One night, while painting the faces of his new wooden puppets, he drew purple lines on the face of one without thinking. He thought of the girl, and there was nothing special about her except those facial markings from a clan he couldn't remember. She was the type to die early, Sasori guessed, from sacrifice. He's killed enough to discern the type.

"People always think that in death, you'd see your departed loved ones welcome you to the afterlife. That's not true. That's only a comfortable illusion to make death less unpleasant. But I've seen it, I've killed and saw through their eyes the fear – death is empty, and no one is waiting for us there," he said to no one.

The dead eyes of the puppet looked at him, and seemed to nod.

_End_


End file.
